On this episode of “The Opinions,” the director of the editorial board David Leonhardt moderates a discussion between the Opinion columnist Bret Stephens, who applauds U.S. military action on Iran, and Rosemary Kelanic, a director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, who warns the United States against striking Iran.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: I’m David Leonhardt, the editorial director of The New York Times editorial board. Every week I’m having conversations to shape the board’s opinions. This week we want to make sense of the war in Iran. Have Israel and the United States achieved their goals? Does Iran still have a nuclear program? And is the cease-fire real?
To answer these questions, I’ve invited two guests with very different points of view. One is my colleague, the columnist Bret Stephens, who has applauded President Trump’s strikes in Iran. Bret, welcome.
Bret Stephens: Good to see you, David.
The other is Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a think tank. Rosemary warned against the U.S. getting involved before Trump bombed Iran.
Rosemary, welcome.
Rosemary Kelanic: Thank you.
Leonhardt: We’re recording this on Tuesday morning, and I want to start by asking you roughly where you think we are and where this is going. So on the one hand, President Trump has referred to this as “the 12-day war,” suggesting that it’s over. And on the other hand, President Trump came out on Tuesday morning and lashed out at both Israel and Iran for continuing to fight longer and more intensely than he wanted. So, Bret, I’m interested: Do you think we’re going to look back on this as the 12-day war, and do you think this part of the hostilities are likely to be over?
Stephens: Well, I hope so, for both sides. I think the Israelis feel that they have accomplished if not all then many of their strategic military goals in substantially degrading Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities. Although we still don’t yet know how substantial the damage is to Iran’s nuclear endeavors. And then, finally, bringing in the United States to bomb and presumably massively degrade Iran’s facilities underground at Fordo. So I think the Israelis feel like, if they haven’t accomplished 100 percent of their goals, they’ve accomplished 80 percent of them.
President Trump, I think, feels very much like he’s accomplished a goal. He said Iran would not get nuclear weapons. He took action that appeared to be decisive. So far, the blowback from Iran appears to be really minimal, although it’s still the early days, so this could unfold over a long period of time.
Leonhardt: Rosemary, what do you think? Do you think we’re going to look back on this as the 12-day war or something longer?
Kelanic: Well, I think I agree with Bret, that I certainly hope so. I certainly hope that any military kinetic phase of this dispute is over, but I am much more pessimistic that this could turn out to be the intermission rather than the end.
I was against Trump getting the United States involved in the war for a number of reasons. But the biggest reason is that there was no urgency in the sense that U.S. intelligence had consistently assessed that Iran was not engaged in weapons research. Iran had enrichment capabilities, but they were not actively trying to weaponize the program, and doing so would take an extra six months to a year at minimum. So there was no urgency.
But then also by attacking Iran, I fear that is going to prove counterproductive because whereas before it was quite clear to me that the Iranians were signaling that they did not actually want a nuclear weapon — they wanted sanctions relief, and they’re playing this brinkmanship game and using this sort of latent nuclear threat or deterrent to get what they wanted out of negotiations. It was pretty clear to me they didn’t actually really want a bomb, or they would have built one. But now the U.S. has given them a huge incentive to build a bomb.
It doesn’t mean they’re actually going to build it, but since we’ve actually struck them and we struck them in the middle of a negotiations process, we’ve made them extremely insecure. And countries that are insecure are more interested in getting a nuclear weapons deterrent. So I’m afraid that even if in the short term this turns out to be a pause or a 12-day war, it could usher in future conflict.
Leonhardt: Well, let’s pull those two things apart. So you talked about urgency, which to some extent is backward-looking, and about the idea that, using your word, it’s counterproductive, which is forward-looking.
So, Bret, can you talk about why you saw a degree of urgency here that Rosemary and people who were against this attack didn’t see?
Stephens: Yeah, I mean, I’m always reminded of that wonderful line attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that intelligence must never be mistaken for intelligence.
Look, the Israelis had a very different assessment of the state of Iran’s nuclear program, owing partly, I think, to superior collection methods, which they’ve demonstrated again and again that they have the state of Iran’s nuclear program. Their assessments were that Iran was much closer, that they had been, in fact, working on elements of bomb designs. But I think there’s also a kind of a confusion about the way in which bombs get made and the timetable. It’s not like you pass a finish line, so to speak, like a trinity test in the New Mexico desert.
What happens really is that countries enter into a kind of a nuclear gray zone as they’re developing weapons. They’ve acquired sufficient amounts of highly enriched uranium. That’s Part 1 of it. They have developed ballistic missiles, which can deploy or field miniaturized nuclear warheads. And what Iran was doing was sort of very systematically putting together all of those components in a way that didn’t quite provide a clear line, which would say to Western intelligence officials: OK, this is the point of no return. But it was getting incredibly close — uncomfortably close.
I think for the Israelis, the sense was that they had to strike before Iran had acquired sufficient quantities of uranium enriched to a 90 percent level, which is what’s broadly considered weapons-grade uranium. They’d gotten to 60 percent, which is very, very close. So from that point of view, it seemed that the urgency — at least from the Israeli perspective — was there.
There was also an opportunity for the Israelis because they had previously substantially degraded Iran’s anti-air capability. So they had a moment of opportunity — an opening. And the question that ultimately needs to be raised isn’t whether Israel waited until the last possible minute or the next to last possible minute. The real question about urgency is just how serious a threat should we see an Iran with a nuclear capability. Not only to Israel’s interest or Middle Eastern interest, but to core American interest. I think the answer is it was an urgent, pressing threat, and there was an opportunity to do something about it. And Israel sees that opportunity, and Donald Trump followed up with what I hope was a decisive blow.
Kelanic: I agree with Bret that there was an opportunity here with the degradation of Iranian capabilities that didn’t exist before, 100 percent. But I think that we need to be critical of the claims that Israel made about intelligence. I don’t think we can just take them at face value because Israel has a dog in the fight. They have a political agenda here. They clearly have wanted to bring the United States into war against Iran and to use U.S. firepower to target these sites for a very long time.
And in fact, the intelligence has been wrong over and over again. The number of times that Israel has cried wolf on Iranian nuclear weapons is astounding. Benjamin Netanyahu warned the Israeli Knesset in 1992 that Iran was a few years away from a nuclear bomb. He repeated that warning in 1995. In 2012, he went to the United Nations with the Wile E. Coyote-looking bomb graphic and said that Iran was only a year away from obtaining a nuclear bomb. So I don’t trust Israeli intelligence on this. I trust U.S. intelligence on this, and U.S. intelligence ascertained the opposite.
Stephens: Well, of course Israel has a dog in the fight, because the Islamic Republic of Iran has been threatening its annihilation, and has been threatening a second Holocaust since it came into power in 1979. So I think it’s quite natural if you’re any Israeli leader, of the left or of the right, that you’re going to take this threat with the utmost seriousness, because this is a regime that states its intentions and then amasses capabilities in order to carry them out. I don’t think we can fault the Israelis for taking this threat seriously.
The reason that we have not had to deal with this previously is because high-quality Israeli intelligence has been succeeding in postponing, delaying or retarding Iran’s nuclear bids for decades. The reason these warnings have not come to fruition is because covert action by Israelis succeeded for a remarkable period of time to consistently postpone Iran’s nuclear bids. Now, it is true that intelligence is sometimes wrong, but I think that the Israelis have demonstrated a capacity for close, remarkable intelligence that I am guessing their counterparts at the C.I.A. could only dream of, in terms of the granularity with which they’ve been able to track down Iranian capabilities and figures that system and harm them.
But the larger point, which Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor made just the other day, is you don’t build a uranium enrichment facility, 300, 200, 300 meters underground if your intentions are peaceful. You just don’t.
Leonhardt: Rosemary, I want to try to understand how you think about this a little bit. I understand that Bret views an Iranian nuclear program as an intolerable threat, and I’m curious: Do you view it as something that the United States can live with or maybe has to live with, has no way to stop? Or do you instead view it as something that is also intolerable, but you didn’t think it was close enough to reality to justify military action?
Kelanic: It’s more the latter. I mean, I don’t want Iran to get nuclear weapons. I do not think that would be a good outcome here. I think, unfortunately, the steps that have been taken make it more likely that they will ultimately get nuclear weapons, not less likely.
Whether Iran with nuclear weapons is an intolerable threat, I think, breaks down into two questions. One, is it an intolerable threat to Israel? One hundred percent. If I were the Israelis, I would be extremely upset about this. I would not want Iran to be anywhere close to a nuclear program. I think everything that they’ve done makes perfect sense. Honestly, I do.
For the United States, though, this is not a direct threat to the United States. It’s just not. Iran can’t reach the United States. They don’t have missiles that can reach the U.S. homeland. They have never attacked the United States homeland. Are they a bad actor? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They’ve caused lots of problems in the region, but they can’t hit the United States and have shown no interest in doing so.
And the fact of the matter is I believe a lot in nuclear deterrence. The United States is the most powerful country in the world. We have overwhelming conventional capabilities. We have overwhelming nuclear capabilities and we can retaliate against Iran. We could probably even prevent them from doing it or pre-empt any kind of Iranian attack. Israel is not in that same situation. Israel is much more vulnerable to Iran. So I do think it’s a much thornier problem for them. And the United States does need to worry about that because the United States cares about Israel. But I don’t think that we can conflate it as a threat against the United States.
Leonhardt: I think for some people, Rosemary, there’s something a little bit counterintuitive about the idea that this attack could accelerate the Iranian program. Iran had these three sites, the U.S. and Israel together have done enormous damage to them. So can you spool out for us, how is it that this attack, in your view, could actually accelerate an Iranian nuclear program?
Kelanic: That’s a great question, and I need to draw a distinction between the capabilities and the intent. So, capabilities: It definitely slows down their ability to pursue a nuclear program, let alone a nuclear weapons program — 100 percent, it does that. However, it gives them urgency and an incentive to go from a civilian nuclear program to a weapons program. It would take them longer to get to a bomb, if that’s in fact what they want. But I’m not convinced that that is what Iran wanted.
If Iran wanted to build a nuclear weapon, they could have done it many years ago. They had already achieved “zero breakout capacity” in June of 2022, according to David Albright. They could have built a weapon then and they did not. That says to me that they were not hellbent on getting a nuclear weapon. Now, if they are hellbent on getting it, this will help prevent them from getting it sooner. But I think that they were not hellbent on getting it, and by attacking them we are risking making them hellbent on getting it. Does that make sense?
Stephens: Can I just go back to something Rosemary said a little bit earlier? I think the conversation we’re getting into is a really interesting one about what this attack will mean for Iran’s intentions. But I want to push back on Rosemary’s contention that Iran — a nuclear Iran — is not a direct threat to the United States. First of all, if you can lob a missile, say, 1,200 miles, you’re going to sooner or later master the technology to lob a missile 7,000 miles, or whatever it is — whatever the range is of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Iran is a country that is busy trying to carry out assassinations on American soil, including my friend Masih Alinejad, including our sometimes contributor John Bolton, the former national security adviser of the United States. The Iranians have demonstrated time and again that they’re up for playing dirty tricks at a great distance. But the more important threat, the thing that really should keep American decision makers up at night, is what an Iranian bomb would mean for proliferation in the Middle East. Because if Iran were to acquire a bomb tomorrow, then the Saudis would surely get a bomb either by buying it from the Pakistanis or developing an indigenous capability. The Turks would do it, the Egyptians would do it. Perhaps the Algerians would do it.
And then you have to ask yourself, as a decision maker in Washington: Do you really want five or six nuclear weapon states in the world’s most volatile region, each of them at daggers drawn with one another? All of a sudden, figuring out the kind of nature of deterrence in a region like that becomes really terrifying for American decision makers. So the interest in the United States and preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon isn’t simply that this is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism in possession of the world’s worst weapons. It’s the chain reaction that it sets off throughout the region.
Kelanic: I agree. I mean, I am not a proliferation dove. Let me just say, the best outcome for the United States is for the United States to have a nuclear weapon and nobody else in the world to have one — like, no country should ever want other countries to have nuclear weapons pointed at them, 100 percent.
But the whole argument about nuclear dominoes is just not borne out by history. I think that there would be negative repercussions if Iran got nuclear weapons for the regional balance. But I do not believe they would play out the way that Bret suggested. The Saudis would not get a bomb. The Saudis would get a security guarantee from the United States to prevent them from ever getting a bomb. That is what we have done with allies in the past. It’s what we did with South Korea. It’s why they don’t have a bomb. It’s what we did with Japan. It’s why they don’t have a bomb. It’s what we did with Germany. It’s why they don’t have a bomb.
Now, I personally don’t want to give the Saudis American security guarantees because I don’t trust them not to then run amok in the region and cause problems for us if we give them security guarantees. But that’s the obvious solution to that problem.
Leonhardt: Bret, let me push you a little bit on one question, which is: Given how strongly you think Iran wants a nuclear weapon, how does this end now, as opposed to Iran continuing to try to do it, and us essentially being committed to continued bombing in the future? We’ve heard that Iran potentially moved some of their uranium. It certainly seems like they now have even more reason to want a nuclear weapon than they did before. So where do you see Iran’s nuclear program going, and how worried are you that we’ve essentially committed ourselves to future rounds of bombing by having done this?
Stephens: Well, I think the choice that confronted the Trump administration wasn’t between Iran with a bomb and Iran with no bomb. It was Iran with a bomb and Iran with hopefully no bomb. And the Iranians were moving into a gray zone where it would’ve become almost impossible to stop them through military means. But we’ve probably retarded their program by some substantial period of time. It’s not easy to reassemble all of the industrial equipment that goes into making nuclear weapons. It’s not easy to find ways to do so in secret now that the Iranian regime knows that it’s been so deeply penetrated by Israeli intelligence, and it’s not easy to do so in the teeth of a president who has now demonstrated that he really is willing to use force if necessary. So my guess is that it’ll actually be many years before Iran can reassemble what it had on the eve of its war with Israel just 12 or whatever, 13, 14 days ago.
Now, does that mean Iran will see the light and realize it needs to invest in economic development rather than squander resources on nuclear capability? I don’t know. But I actually think there’s a better chance of that than people assume. Of course, Rosemary could turn out to be right — that the lesson the Iranians draw is we should have gotten a nuclear weapon much sooner, and now they’ll be hellbent on acquiring one. It’s possible that all of their national efforts will shift toward that goal, especially if the current leadership is replaced by an I.R.G.C. figure even more extreme and less cautious. That’s totally within the realm of possibility.
But it’s also possible they’ll see that they have invested $500 billion into a wasted effort that brought them nothing but humiliation, and loss of hardware and prestige — and decide to change course. Strategically, they’re in a much worse position now, thanks to Israeli actions in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Out of national interest — and the interest of preserving the regime — they may choose to recalibrate and seek a different path. And by the way, it’s also possible that six months or a year from now, when the next morality policeman beats and murders an Iranian woman in the streets, setting off demonstrations, the regime, now weaker and more uncertain, may have a harder time suppressing dissent with the same engines of repression it’s relied on in the past. Over time, I think the regime becomes more vulnerable to internal change — and hopefully to positive change.
Leonhardt: What do you think of that, Rosemary?
Kelanic: I hope that Bret’s right. I hope that Iran takes this lesson as a reason to go ahead and get rid of their nuclear program and comply with all these U.S. demands and become a more responsible and less belligerent actor in the region. That is a possibility. But what I’m worried the most about is that everybody understands attacking Iran makes Iran angry, makes Iran feel insecure and increases their motivations to want a bomb. And what I’m afraid will happen is that even if Iran puts all its cards on the table and says, here are all the facilities, here’s all the stuff, bring all the people in, bring in the I.A.E.A. inspectors, we’re coming clean, we’re giving it all up, I’m worried that that won’t be enough for Israel.
Iran could reasonably argue that they did that in 2015 — that they put their cards on the table and complied. And it still wasn’t enough to reassure the United States and Israel that it was not going to get nuclear weapons. And certainly, the sort of flirtation with regime change that Trump has posted on social media and that Netanyahu has occasionally referenced doesn’t help Iran not feel worried about that possibility.
But the problem is, if there’s no trust with Israel, which I don’t blame them for not trusting Iran — Iran retaliated and killed Israelis, like, Israel should be mad at Iran. But how will Israel know that they can ever really trust Iran? They won’t.
Leonhardt: When I look at what has happened since Oct. 7, 2023 — to Iran in particular, even if some of the details have been problematic — I look at Iran as a malevolent force in the world that’s killed a lot of Americans over the years, that is very clear that it wants to destroy the state of Israel. And I see in Iran that over the last nearly three years it has vastly weakened in ways that, honestly, I couldn’t have predicted it. Its proxy forces, Hamas and Hezbollah, are vastly weakened. Its nuclear program is weakened, even if it now has a bigger incentive to do it.
And I look at that as an American and as someone who favors democracy, and that cheers me in some ways that a force for ill in the world, a country that has this phrase “death to America” and that has really caused a lot of pain and suffering over the last several decades, is much, much weaker and much less able to cause that suffering. I think you look at that differently. And so I want to ask you to tell me why you think that this framing that I put on it is either wrong or incomplete.
Kelanic: I mean, look, I don’t want to make any excuses for Iran. Iran has put themselves in this situation. They chant things like “death to Israel” and “death to America.” They are the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. Now, that doesn’t mean that they’re a threat to the United States. They’re not sponsoring terrorism against the United States. They have not attacked the United States on its own soil.
After 9/11, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and made it 100 percent clear that any regime that allows somebody from their country to attack the United States homeland is going to get overthrown. We have made a very credible promise that if Iran ever allowed somebody within Iran to attack the U.S. homeland, we would go and overthrow Iran. So I am not worried that Iran — as awful as they are — I’m not worried that they’re going to attack the United States in the near future, apart from the fact that we just bombed them. Ultimately, you have to think that they’re suicidal to be willing to attack the United States when the United States has conventional preponderance and nuclear preponderance.
I do see evidence of some rationality and restraint coming out of Iran in terms of how they responded to the U.S. attack. They could have gone all out and attacked a bunch of U.S. forward-operating bases in Syria and Iraq that are super vulnerable and that don’t have a lot of missile defense. But they didn’t do that. They had a very calibrated sort of escalate-to-de-escalate response.
If the United States really thinks that Iran might be trying to get a nuclear weapon — there’s no end to what that would require the United States to do. Either we have boots on the ground in the form of I.A.E.A. inspectors who go to these sites and say: Yes, they’ve been destroyed. And yes, Iran is complying. That’s one way to make sure they don’t get the bomb. But the other way is with a regime change operation. I’m worried that there’s some risk that the United States might go down that road, and I think that that would be a disaster for everybody. I don’t think that’s something that a lot of people really want to have happen. I don’t think that the president wants that to happen, but I do think that’s a concern.
Leonhardt: That actually perfectly tees up my closing question for you, Bret, which is when the United States has gotten involved in the Middle East and the broader region in the 21st century, I think it’s ended badly every time: Afghanistan, the second Iraq war, Libya. And to some extent, what I think I hear you saying is this one can end better.
I know a lot of people heard when President Trump came out and announced this attack and talked about, in his Trumpian language, how it had been the greatest attack that anyone’s ever seen, I think people heard echoes of George W. Bush with “Mission Accomplished.” And so I’m interested in why you think this operation has a chance to be the first U.S. military involvement in the Middle East in the 21st century that’s going to end well. Or tell us if you think I’m framing that question unfairly.
Stephens: Well, it remains to be seen, but when I think of the parade of horribles that we were hearing from people like Tucker Carlson, thousands of Americans dead if the United States were to bomb Fordo, it seems that this — as we’re speaking now — has been an astonishing success: the massive degradation of Iran’s nuclear capabilities in a swift period of time, at no cost so far to American lives and with the Iranians very swiftly signaling that they want to back down both vis-à-vis the United States and also with the Israelis. I’m a great believer in Winston Churchill’s phrase “in victory, magnanimity.” And I think a lot will depend on how the United States proceeds diplomatically from here.
One of the things I’ve suggested for the Trump administration — I wrote this in a column just last week — is essentially to first bomb Fordo, and of course Natanz and Isfahan. But then offer the following deal, which I think would be very useful, even if the Iranians reject it: In exchange for Iran verifiably abandoning its enrichment programs and its nuclear programs, and ending support for proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas, that the United States would lift all economic sanctions. We should find ways to entice the Iranian regime with proverbial offers that no sane country can refuse — to see if we can turn a new leaf.
But, you know, as Niels Bohr or Yogi Berra or someone said: Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. So I don’t want to discount anything that Rosemary has said in terms of how this might affect the regime going forward. It’s an open and interesting — and in many ways, of course, terrifying — question.
Leonhardt: Rosemary, even if you think that deal is unlikely, would you welcome it?
Kelanic: Yes, 100 percent, yes.
Leonhardt: Well, that is a good place to end it on — a point of shared hope. Rosemary, Bret, thank you so much.
Stephens: Thank you.
Kelanic: Thank you.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
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